


The Last Days Of Childhood

by PresquePommes



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: INDEFINITE HIATUS, M/M, Modern AU, Private Investigators, Supernatural - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-28
Updated: 2015-03-29
Packaged: 2018-03-20 00:14:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3629517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PresquePommes/pseuds/PresquePommes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Eren was seventeen, five kids went missing in his neighborhood. </p><p>When Eren was seventeen, he met a boy who seemed like somebody who might finally get it.</p><p>When Eren was seventeen, he stopped being a kid anymore.</p><p>When Eren was twenty-three, he started chasing a whole different level of danger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Why did I write yet another fic. I have so many on-going fics.
> 
> What is wrong with me.
> 
> (There is more to this, but I don't trust myself not to peter out if I try and write it all at once. Depends on interest.)

“I can’t fucking wait to graduate from this shithole, Armin,” Eren sighed.

A soothing kind of warmth was seeping from the wall into the back of his sweater, but he could feel how rough and uneven the bricks were where he had his head leaned back against it. The sky was clear, but it wasn’t quite blue enough to make up for the discomfort.

He still couldn’t muster the energy to move.

It was only when he realized that Armin had gone quiet that he knew he’d been talking at all.

“Eren,” Armin started, and Eren flinched.

It was the extra soft tone, the one he reserved for those moments where he was hurt but not surprised that Eren hadn’t been listening.

 _‘I’m not angry,’_ that voice said, _‘I’m just disappointed.’_

Armin would make a great father someday, he thought.

“Eren, what was I talking about?”

He rolled his head to the side and lowered his eyes from the sky to Armin’s face. Silhouetted by mid-afternoon blue, his neatly-brushed hair looked lit from beneath like a lampshade- diffuse yellow, like the one in his grandfather’s study.

Eren didn’t know, but he also didn’t want to admit that he didn’t know, so he settled for just looking at Armin silently, eyes apologetic but jaw set.

Armin sighed. It sounded a lot more adult and respectable than Eren’s sighs ever sounded. He kind of envied that.

“Annie’s missing,” he said gently.

The pleasant chill of the afternoon breeze seemed to die instantly, and the air grew warm and close around Eren’s face.

“What?” He said first, and then, “no. No, she’s probably got mono or something, that’s not-”

“Eren, she’s been declared a missing person.” He could only half-see Armin’s eyes in the shadow of his backlit face, but his voice was sad and earnest. “It’s been three weeks.”

Eren just stared at him. No matter how much he breathed, his lungs never seemed to draw in enough air.

“No,” he heard himself whisper from very far away.

“I know you don’t want to- I wasn’t sure how to tell you,” Armin said, crouching and then, hesitantly, sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of him. Dimly, Eren was alarmed by this action- he knew Armin didn’t like to sit on the asphalt by the parking lot.

Too many cigarette butts.

Armin’s eyes were as sad as his voice.

Eren looked up at the sky again. It was somehow even less blue than before. “Annie’s-” His voice cracked, and he swallowed against something thick and obstructive before trying again. “Annie’s the… fourth?” It didn’t seem real.

“She’s the fifth,” Armin told him very quietly.

He shook his head, feeling the edge of a brick dig into his scalp through his hair. “No,” he muttered, “No, no way. We know Annie, Annie’s cool, Annie can’t just-”

“They’re going to hold an assembly after lunch.”

_‘Are you going?’_

“No,” he repeated, and Armin left him alone.

It was a Tuesday in late September.

 “No,” he mumbled, and the breeze came back. His cheeks felt tight where the tears rolled down them.

They were cold by the time he felt them fall from his chin onto the collar of his t-shirt.

He just couldn’t bring himself to move.

Eren Jaeger was seventeen. He would be eighteen in March.

Annie Leonhardt was supposed to turn eighteen eight days before him.

***

By October, they’d stopped picking fights with him.

He’d gone a little off since Annie had gone missing, they said.

He knew what else they were saying about him. About his relationship with Annie.

It was easier not to correct them.

He couldn’t really explain the sense of loss he felt- couldn’t do anything but pour words into the hole her absence had ripped in his world. His eyes kept looking for her, waiting for her to pass him in the hall, waiting for her to meet his eye and nod in acknowledgement, just the way she’d always done.

The best he could do to explain it was just to say,

_‘She made the other four real.’_

Five kids missing in the last eighteen months.

Three in the last school year.

One over the summer.

Annie in the very first week of fall.

 They weren’t a big town.

Five kids was a lot of kids.

He spent a lot of time thinking about five kids going missing in a little town and not a lot of time thinking about much of anything else.

In second period on a Wednesday in mid-October, somebody kicked the leg of his desk and he looked up to see a face he didn’t recognize.

“Hey,” the person said.

Eren stared at him.

“Who the fuck are you?” The curse slipped out absentmindedly, and his eyes darted towards the front of the class instinctively, looking for the teacher.

“Jeffrey,” the new kid said shortly, and Eren’s eyes flew back to him incredulously. “Transfer student. I’ve been in your class since Monday.”

He did not look like a Jeffrey, or even a Jeff. Eren was having trouble reconciling his heavy-lidded eyes and angular, not-quite-delicate features with a name like Jeffrey.

“Where’s Miss Courning?” he asked.

“Getting a projector from the supply room,” Jeffrey told him, “it’s movie day. You got something on your mind?”

Eren squinted at him. “Yeah, not that that’s any of your business. Why are you talking to me?”

Hands still tucked in his pockets, Jeffrey lifted his shoulders in a lazy shrug. Eren found himself suddenly much more aware of how deceptive his initial slightness seemed to be- beneath his hoodie, there was a lurking thickness to his arms, a certain hidden solidity to his torso.

His eyes flickered back up again, this time more cautiously.

_‘Are you picking a fight with me?’_

He wanted to ask. The prospect was a little exciting. He wanted a good fight. It had been a while.

“What’s your name?” Jeffrey asked him abruptly, apparently unconcerned by the wildness Eren could feel growing on his face.

He paused, confused. “Eren.”

Jeffrey hummed, eyes flickering appraisingly over him, and then the door opened.

Eren watched him slink surreptitiously back into his seat in the corner of the classroom as the teacher began to set up the projector.

After she turned out the lights, he got the impression he was being watched right back.

***

He wasn’t really all that surprised.

“What, are you following me now?” Eren asked rudely, looking him over. He found himself hesitating- on one hand, Jeffrey didn’t look like he was out to pick a fight and Eren was just getting started on his lunch, but on the other, he didn’t want his head at easy kicking level if he was wrong.

In any case, he was glad Armin had chess club on Wednesdays.

Jeffrey just shrugged again. “I’m new. Just trying to make friends.”

Eren couldn’t contain his snort. “If you’ve run out of enough options that you think I’m a good one, you must be a real asshole,” he accused. “I’m not-” He paused to stab an olive with his fork. One of the plastic tines broke and he swore, throwing it towards the parking lot and picking up the olive with his fingers. “By now you’ll have heard.”

For the first time, Eren saw the new kid crack a smile- only a tiny one, crooked and just a little bit sly, and all but gone by the time Eren had turned to look at him properly, but a smile nonetheless.

It would be that image of him that would stay in Eren’s mind long after Jeffrey was gone.

“I’ve heard,” Jeffrey confirmed, but he didn’t move to go.

Eren studied for a moment and then scooted over a little, more as an invitation than for any real reason- it was a long, empty wall.

Jeffrey studied the ground beside him for a moment, face unreadable, before sweeping the cigarette butts away with the side of his foot and sitting down.

Despite the subtle muscularity he seemed to be hiding under his baggy clothes, he moved with a certain primness at times, Eren noticed- not feminine so much as feline, quietly dissatisfied but obliging, like a cat pacing the edge of a bathtub in search of its owner’s attention.

He found himself smiling and wasn’t sure why.

They sat in silence together until Eren offered him an olive.

Jeffrey’s expression was impassive, but his eyebrow furrowed a little as he looked down at Eren’s damp fingers.

Eren got the impression that he wanted to say something very different from the,

“I’m alright, thanks,”

he answered with.

He’d barely put it in his own mouth when Jeffrey spoke again.

“Did you know her?”

He chewed slowly and pretended he hadn’t heard.

“The missing girl,” Jeffrey asked him quietly, “did you know her?” Eren could feel the weight of his gaze on the side of his face.

He swallowed and started packing away his lunch, appetite lost. “Just trying to make friends, huh?”

“So you did.”

He closed his eyes for a moment and breathed deeply, trying to quell his irritation. “What are you, a fucking cop?” he snarled, turning to meet his eyes. “Yeah. I know Annie.” He paused- still had to correct himself. “I knew Annie.”

The air was charged.

_‘What of it?’_

He didn’t ask it, but he didn’t have to. He could see he was being read loud and clear.

Jeffrey held his gaze for a moment before looking away, forward across the parking lot. “Everybody keeps talking about her. I guess I’m sitting in her seat.”

For a second, Eren wasn’t sure if he was talking about his seat in the classroom or about where he was sitting against the wall, but then he realized it didn’t matter, because both were equally loaded statements.

“It’s not her seat anymore,” Eren told him sullenly.

He could feel Jeffrey looking at him again.

“Doesn’t mean it’s mine.”

It was a strange thing to say, and yet, somehow, it was the right thing.

The bell trilled through the yard as if it had been cued.

Eren only hesitated for a moment.

“You wanna ditch class with me?” he asked suddenly. “I kinda want to show you something.”

Jeffrey’s eyebrows inched upwards. “Sure.”

It sounded like a question, but he followed Eren in standing anyway, only pausing to brush the grit off his jeans with a look of slight distaste.

***

“You know,” Jeffrey said after they veered off the path and into the underbrush, “I’m starting to feel like at least one of us must be stupid.”

Eren grunted interrogatively, eying the surrounding trees for markers. “Why’s that?”

“Well, five kids have gone missing in your town, and neither of us know each other very well,” he mused, “and yet you thought it was a good idea to invite me into the woods with you.” He was silent for a moment. “And I thought it was a good idea to say yes.”

Eren glanced over his shoulder at him.

Despite his words, Jeffrey didn’t actually seem all that concerned. “Well, I haven’t been disappearing people and you haven’t been here long enough to, either, so it seems pretty alright to me,” Eren grinned.

Jeffrey snorted. “I could still be a serial killer.”

“You’re too short to be a serial killer,” Eren disagreed, scrambling up a familiar slope. Jeffrey made a disgruntled sound as he climbed after him. “And what kind of serial killer has a name like Jeff?”

“That’s- somehow I don’t think it works that way,” he was saying, but Eren wasn’t listening anymore.

The base was just like he remembered it being- a weather-stained concrete bunker settled into a hillside, door half-obscured by tree roots that had left the safety of the soil to grow over the front of the building into the earth below.

Their mark was still there on the concrete, only a little more faded than he remembered.

“Holy shit,” Jeffrey murmured. “What is this?”

“Reiner’s castle under the earth,” Eren said proudly. For a fraction of a moment, he could almost hear him laughing- could still smell the pungency of burning herbs eking out into the open air. “We used to come here.”

He ran his fingers over what was left of their mark, grinning to himself as he remembered Bertholdt quietly correcting their shoddy spray painting skills as they bickered over whose fault the last mistake had been.

“Annie really only had a couple of friends- Bertholdt and Reiner. They were both a year above us.” He thought about going in. It had been a long time. “They grew up together. Last year, right at the beginning of the year, I got into a fight with a senior and nearly broke Reiner’s nose when he tried to break it up. I guess he decided he liked me, then, and we started hanging out. The four of us hung out here until Bert and Reiner graduated.”

Jeffrey was quiet for long enough that he actually jumped a little in surprise when he spoke.

“So you were friends with… Reiner? What about Annie? You didn’t come here with her?”

He glanced back, only half-looking. “Nah. Annie and I were cool, but we weren’t really close. She was quiet, I was loud, and Reiner and I did most of the talking. So yeah, we’d spar sometimes, but we didn’t really talk.” He considered it. “After Reiner graduated, we just sort of… stopped. Wanna go inside?”

He looked back expecting another lazy shrug, but for once, Jeffrey’s sleepy eyes looked alert and careful. “Really starting to feel like one of us is pretty goddamn stupid,” he murmured, and the hair on the back of Eren’s neck prickled away from the skin.

After a moment of indecision, he raised his hands in front of him disarmingly. “I really hope it’s not me, because if you’re actually a serial killer, I’m probably kinda fucked,” he admitted.

Jeffrey scrutinized him and then laughed sharply, all the tension seeming to flow out of his body with it. “Yeah, probably. Have you told anybody else about this place?”

Eren shook his head. “I thought about telling Armin, but he’s not- I don’t know. He’d want to tell the cops, just in case it could help.”

“You don’t think it might? Did you come here to look for her?”

Eren fixed him with a long look. “No,” he answered slowly. “This is the first time I’ve come here since last year.”

Goosebumps prickled along his arms as he thought again, a little differently, about what might lie behind that door.

He felt his eyes drawing towards it almost without him wanting them to.

The moment stretched breathlessly on. The air seemed almost to hum, and the woods suddenly seemed very quiet by comparison. He only realized he was reaching for the door when he felt the chill of October air on his hand and recognized that he’d drawn it out of his pocket.

“So why’d you tell me?”

Jeffrey’s voice lanced through the tension. Eren blinked and looked at him, dropping his arm back to his side.

He hadn’t moved- he still stood a strangely cautious distance from the bunker, face relaxed but posture careful.

“You seemed like you’d get it,” he said simply, and then waved a hand in frustration at Jeffrey’s inquisitive look. “I’m-”

_‘really fucked up,’_

he didn’t say.

“I’m from Shiganshina. I was living there when the riots broke out.”

Jeffrey sucked in a sharp breath between his teeth, eyebrows knitting. “No shit?”

Something about his reaction made Eren pause- he was used to laughing amazement and over-serious pity laced with morbid curiosity, but not this quiet understanding of the true gravity of the thing.

“Yeah,” he confirmed. “Armin, too, but he was with his grandfather when it happened. The cops got me out.” He chewed the inside of his cheek absentmindedly. “They weren’t fast enough to get my mom out.”

The hiss Jeffrey responded to that with was strangely gratifying.

 _‘You get it. Somehow, you_ get _it,’_

he wanted to insist.

“I didn’t think Armin would get why I don’t want to tell the cops about this place,” he explained, shrugging. “I told you because I kinda felt like you might.”

The look he got for that was contemplative and a little strange. “I do,” Jeffrey told him. “I get it.”

Eren sat down heavily against the side of the bunker, back against the lower part of the faded sigil.

“Y’know,” he mused aloud, “I used to want to be a cop.”

“Yeah?”

He wasn’t really sure why he was telling Jeffrey this, but the way the new kid only seemed to be giving him half his attention as he eyeballed the building kind of helped.

“Yeah. When I was a kid I thought I’d do people some good, save the world and all that, and then when I lost Mom I thought I’d make sure it didn’t happen to anybody else.” He stopped following Jeffrey with his eyes and looked up, watching the not-quite-blue-enough sky filter through the dark leaves far above their heads.

Something crawled over his hand. He shook it off, but didn’t bother to look.

“Now I just feel like if I became a cop, I’d turn into the same kind of cop I don’t like, you know?”

“Yeah,” Jeffrey said softly. “I know.”

There was something sleepy about the quiet stillness of the forest.

“This place always makes me feel like I’ve been toking up way too much,” he commented, and then yawned. “Reiner said it was Pavlovian, but I dunno.” Another yawn.

He felt his eyes growing heavy.

Something crawled across his thigh and he couldn’t be bothered to do more than twitch it.

“Eren,” Jeffrey called.

He forced his eyes open.

Jeffrey was looking at him with strange eyes. “Come here.”

For a moment, he considered telling him to fuck off and let him nap, but something in his expression promised something darker than a simple kick awake, so he didn’t.

He felt something heavy slide down and off his thigh when he went to stand, but before he could look down at it, Jeffrey called him again.

“Get over here.”

“Jesus, man,” he muttered. “What’s your problem?”

“We need to head back,” Jeffrey insisted. “I have to be back in time to meet my ride. I’ve been here less than a week- he’s going to be pissed if he finds out I was skipping.”

The words themselves made perfect sense, but the way he said it sounded strangely rehearsed. Eren squinted at his back as he stumbled down the incline after him.

Jeffrey walked quickly for someone with short legs, and the forest suddenly seemed like it was trying to trip up Eren with every second step- they’d barely made it down before Jeffrey doubled back and started dragging him by the arm.

At first, Eren thought his fast pace would make him stumble and send them both into the leaves, but when he did, he realized just how strong Jeffrey’s grip was.

Something about it made him feel even stranger.

It wasn’t until they broke back out onto the path that he started to feel clearer-headed, and he didn’t feel mostly normal again until they’d actually left the cover of the trees.

He was still blinking owlishly when Jeffrey steered him towards the parking lot and finally let him go.

When he looked down, he was being looked back up at with dark, unreadable eyes.

“Eren,” Jeffrey said suddenly, “I think you’d make a pretty good cop.”

He opened his mouth to answer and then closed it, confused.

A blond man in a suit was walking crisply towards them. His smile seemed strangely professional.

“Is that your dad?” he asked, puzzled.

Jeffrey glanced towards him.

“I’m adopted,” he said simply. “See you around.”

“See you around,” Eren echoed weakly.

He would not, in fact, see him around.

Not for a very long time.

***

His father wasn’t around when he woke up the next morning, and he never thought to check his phone, so he found out the news the hard way- when he rode his bike to school, the premises were cordoned off, and there were both police officers and firefighters present in abundance.

The woods were burning.

When they finished burning, one of the volunteer firefighters found a silver ring amongst the ashes.

It was identified as belonging to one of the missing kids: the first.

Nothing else conclusive was found.

That little silver ring haunted Eren, as did the new kid’s smile.

***

It was November.

He was turning twenty-four in March.

Annie would’ve turned twenty-four eight days before him.

He never forgot that.

“All settled in for the night, over,” he spoke into his radio, releasing the trigger on the side with a grin.

 _“Copy that,”_ Armin’s voice answered sleepily, crackling a bit. _“Keep us posted if you see anything.”_

“Always do,” he confirmed, and then lay his radio on the dashboard. He jostled an empty energy drink can with the side of his hand. It clattered to the floor, spilling a few tiny droplets on the carpet next to his shoes.

He didn’t bother to pick it up.

The handheld recorder fit so familiarly into his hands that he didn’t have to look for the record button anymore.

 _“Day fifteen of the Trost Western playground stakeout,”_ he started. _“Still no sign of the creep who’s been leaving burnt doll parts on the slide.”_

He let it record silence for a second, just thinking.

 _“The cops might think this is nothing to bother with, but,”_ he licked his lips, _“but I’ve got a real good feeling about tonight.”_

Widely regarded by the police as treading a little close to the wrong side of the law, private investigator Eren Jaeger almost always had a good feeling about things about to go terribly wrong.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I was a kid, I wanted to write horror novels.

It was twelve minutes past three in the morning.

He was seconds away from nodding off when a dark shape started moving across the playground.

He scrambled for his radio.

“Armin, I-” he started, but the radio squawked in protest, something it only did when he tried to send a message when a message was being sent to him.

He released the trigger but never took his eyes off the figure weaving its way around the back of the jungle gym.

_“Eren, I need you to find a motel for the night.”_

There was something strange and hushed about Armin’s tone that made him pause.

“I’m on stakeout,” he started, and then his radio squealed again.

_“Get off stakeout and get inside. I’ll call you when we’re clear.”_

The figure was placing a doll head on the base of the slide and turning it slowly. The face was coming into view.

He was torn.

For some reason, its fingers seemed less distinct in the vague glow of the streetlight reflecting off the metal of the slide than they had in the darkness closer to the edge of the playground. Looking at them against the crisper lines of the doll head was making his eyes hurt.

The hair was standing away from the skin of his forearms.

A chill crawled across his scalp as the doll head was turned to face him.

“Copy that,” he said reluctantly, and his headlights blazed to life as he started the engine.

In them, something his tired eyes mistook for eerily more like a shadow than a person flitted behind the slide and out of sight.

“Fuck,” he swore quietly, turning out of his hiding spot and back out onto the street. His tires thumped against the asphalt as he crested the curb and sped smoothly away. “Almost fucking had him.”

Away from the scene, his racing heart started to slow, and the sense of strange urgency he felt faded into disgruntlement and worry.

He fumbled for his recorder, one hand on the steering wheel.

 _“Something’s up at home base,”_ he reported, and the second the words were out of his mouth he knew where he was driving. _“Armin wants me to hole up and wait for an update.”_

He clenched his jaw, pausing to turn a sharp corner.

_“Sorry, Armin. Maybe you’ll thank me later.”_

***

Home base wasn’t anything glamourous.

It was portable.

It had to be.

He didn’t like it when people called it a recreational vehicle- most of time, there was nothing recreational about what they used it for.

Motorhome he could accept.

As far as he was concerned, it was both home and home base, because while Connie and Sasha could disappear back to Connie’s mom’s place and Armin was happy to visit his grandfather, Eren had no desire to go back to his father’s empty house.

 Home had four wheels and an engine and he was fine with that.

He knew enough to recognize the dark sedan parked beside home base as the bad news it very well could be, and turned off his headlights long before he turned in and parked at the other end of the lot, hidden under the shadow of the trees.

As he killed the engine, he realized he’d parked himself too tight to the curb to open his door.

The blessing of manual windows didn’t make the process of worming his way out of the car any more pleasant. He could only get it rolled about halfway up again from the outside.

_‘It’ll do.’_

The lot was quiet- aside from the three vehicles parked in it, it was empty, secluded, which was why they’d chosen it.

He wondered for the first time since they’d put down in the area if it wasn’t empty for a reason- the night air was still save for a few crickets, and each went silent one by one as he crept across the part of the grass that was shaded from the orange glow of the streetlights.

By the time he’d reached the front grill of the strange sedan, the last cricket had fallen quiet, and not even the ambient hum of traffic broke the hush of the early hour.

The lights were on in home base, filtering yellow through the curtains, but the cab was dark. Now that he’d come closer, he could see a dim shape stalking the length of the windows.

Even before it paused to pull one of the curtains slightly aside, he knew it wasn’t one of his team.

He came home late often enough to know their silhouettes by sight: Connie, forever running his palms back over the always-smooth curve of his skull; Sasha, her ponytail bobbing as she nodded or freed hair whipping wildly around her shoulders as she flitted from kitchen to living area; Armin, his ever-longer hair pulled out of his face into a neat but absentminded twist while he considered another lead, another note of interest.

He knew them well enough to know a coffee cup from a beer can in Connie’s hands, to tell if Sasha’s fidgeting was related to hunger or excitement, and to see that Armin had once again misplaced his pen by tucking in into his hair for safekeeping and forgetting about it.

This figure prowled, movements fluid but muscles tight, like a predator on the hunt.

He crept past the cab and around to the other side of the vehicle, keeping himself low and tight against the side, out of sight of the window, until he reached the nearly-invisible hatch to the storage space under the floor.

It was strange, thinking he’d finally do what Connie had always insisted would be a move he’d like to see used in a spy movie- he could still hear Connie rambling excitedly about the possibilities that outside hatch posed, opening up into the space beneath the couch cushions.

He was, however, glad Connie had insisted they leave it unlocked, at least. He’d just always thought he’d finally end up crawling through it as a result of losing his keys.

Climbing into his second confined space of the evening felt considerably less glamorous than he was sure Connie thought it would- in the haphazard crush of travel coolers and cardboard boxes and garbage bags filled with extra clothes, he could barely reach back to close the hatch behind him.

Above him, the light tap of shoes on the thinly carpeted floor abruptly stopped.

He stayed very still, waiting.

It felt like a small eternity had passed until he realized that someone was, in fact, moving again- the intruder’s footsteps were so light as to be almost inaudible.

He found himself holding his breath at every rustle of plastic or scrape against the floor he caused as he dragged himself through the narrow space on his belly. By the time he’d made his way to under the couch, he could hear someone speaking.

_“Where’s the other one?”_

His instinctual response was to identify it as a voice he didn’t know, but in the darkness beneath the floor, he began to second-guess himself almost immediately.

_“Wha- what are you talking about? Everybody’s here, I don’t know what you’re-”_

Connie, from somewhere close to the cab. He sounded nervous.

Eren stared up at the faint light eking down between the cushions and through the heavy mesh they sat on and realized with a thrill of wonder that someone had seen fit to remove the slab of fibreboard they’d installed beneath it.

_“Don’t fucking lie to me. You- where’s the other one? Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”_

They’d put it there to keep the worst of the chill from seeping up through the couch at night. Armin never forgot to replace it after he put something new in storage, and if someone else did, he was always quick to correct that.

For his sake.

_“Why are you so convinced there must be four of us? There are only two beds. It’s hard enough to fit three people in a camper this size.”_

Armin, by the window to his left. Smooth, coaxing. Eren waited, unsure if he should act. If Armin had the situation under control, he’d only make it worse by revealing himself.

An impatient sigh. _“I know there are four of you.”_ Clipped, professional. Familiar. Eren shook his head to clear it. _“Those two share the bottom bunk. She sleeps on the outside, and he sleeps against the wall. You sleep on the top bunk.”_ As the stranger’s voice grew closer, the feeling that he’d heard it before grew from a whisper to a nag.

Something blocked the meagre light that was filtering down to him from between the couch cushions.

_“The fourth one sleeps on the couch- head here, feet here. Dark hair, maybe… jaw-length, or a little longer.”_

A cold shiver worked its way up his spine. There was something cold, contemplative, and yet strangely intimate about that tone.

He knew he couldn’t be seen, but he still felt exposed.

 _“Sometimes we have guests and we don’t vacuum their hair off the couch after,”_ Armin answered, sounding amused. Calm. Eren slowed his breathing. _“Is that a crime?”_

A moment of silence, and then, very close, the sound of fabric against fabric.

What sounded like an inhale. _“Whoever’s been using this blanket has been using it recently. Less than twenty-four hours.”_

Eren hesitated. The light returned.

_“Where’s the other one?”_

He shoved the mesh upwards, hard, knowing that the cushions would obstruct its hinges, and scrambled out as fast as he could.

His legs were aching from kneeling for so long, and the difficulty caused by the mesh falling on his back as he freed himself meant that he only had a split-second to utilize the element of surprise, so he lunged without looking, knocking both of them down and slamming his elbow against the floor when he landed.

From somewhere ahead and a little to the right, he heard Sasha whoop with surprise.

He wasn’t sure if it qualified as a grapple- he grabbed randomly, made contact, and punched.

This was, unfortunately, the only hit he got in.

His opponent recoiled, wrestled him to the ground, and with strength far exceeding his own, pinned his arm behind his back and his cheek to the floor.

The hand pressing down on his head didn’t feel big, but it was strong and insistent in a way that suggested to Eren that he may have put himself in a rather unfortunate position.

“Well, that answers-” A displeased-sounding grunt, and sudden weight on his thighs as he started to thrash. “- _that_ fucking question. Christ. You just couldn’t make this easy for me, could you?”

Armin was sighing through his nose. Eren struggled to look at him.

The hand on his head lifted and grabbed for his free arm, but before he could do more than struggle, something heavy forced his chest back into the floor. He squirmed harder as he felt the man on top of him slip something thin and smooth around his wrists.

It closed the gap between them with a sound not unlike a zipper, and began to cut into his skin uncomfortably almost immediately.

The hand on his head returned, but the one that had been holding his forearms to his back was replaced was something he thought might be a knee.

In the periphery of his vision, he saw something dark being slipped out of a holster on the stranger’s hip- his heart had already started to race by the time he identified it as a handheld radio.

A much nicer one than theirs, he recognized with vague envy.

“I was right: there’s a fourth.”

It barely even crackled. _“Need backup?”_

“No, it’s taken care of.”

Eren squinted through his hair, trying to make out the intruder’s face.

_“You’re sure that’s everyone?”_

The man on top of him paused and then leaned close. It took Eren a moment to figure out what he was doing.

“Did you just fucking _sniff_ me?” he croaked incredulously. The hand on his skull pressed down harder, but the man gave no other indication he’d heard.

“Yeah, he’s the last one,” he confirmed.

_“Understood. I’ll join you when I’ve cleared the site. Get comfortable.”_

For a second, Eren thought he was going to respond, but he seemed to think better of it. Eren watched him slip the radio back into its holster with short, strong-looking fingers.

That hand squeezed his shoulder. “Alright, kid, are you going to make this harder than it has to be?”

Eren growled and snapped at his fingers, baring his teeth when they were snatched back.

“Jesus, why is there _always_ one of you that can’t just seem to-”

When the stranger went quiet, Eren didn’t know what to think.

When he started trying to push Eren’s hair out of his face, he _really_ didn’t know what to think.

“Hold still, I’m just trying to-” Time stopped. Eren stared. “I _know_ you.”

All the air seemed to leave the room at once.

At first, Eren wanted to say he hadn’t aged- that somehow, the slight adolescent softness of his cheeks hadn’t thinned with time like the rest of theirs, that he was somehow still living on the cusp of eighteen when the rest of them had moved on to their twenties, but the wavering lines starting to etch themselves between those thin brows and the ever-darkening circles under those heavy-lidded eyes suggested something else entirely.

Something, he realized, he really didn’t like the idea of.

“No,” he refused. “No. No way.”

“Ah, _shit_ ,” Jeffrey cursed. The hair fell back into Eren’s eyes as he released it to fumble his radio back out. “Erwin, we have a problem: number four is the kid from the Leonhardt case.”

_“Shiganshina?”_

“No _fucking_ way this is happening right now,” Eren snarled, writhing even as his wrists began to burn against their restraints. “It’s _you_ , it’s _fucking you_ , why is _always fucking you_ -”

“Eren, please try to calm down,” Armin pleaded, and Eren screamed with frustration as his attempts to buck off Jeffrey’s weight yielded nothing an opportunity to slam his own head into the floor.

Something warm started to trickle down his face. When his struggling smeared it on the carpeting and the sharp smell of pennies filled his nose, Eren realized it was blood.

“Eren, _please_ , you’re going to hurt yourself-”

“Listen to your friend,” Jeffrey told him tightly, bearing down heavily on Eren’s shoulders, knees tight against his writhing hips. “The sooner you cooperate, the sooner this will all be over.”

Panting with exhaustion, Eren stared at him through hair made increasingly damp by both sweat and blood. “You’re Jeffrey,” he accused, “Armin, this is him, this is Jeffrey, he’s number six, he’s the one who disappeared after Annie and the cops never said anything about it and this is why, isn’t it, you did this, you _fucking_ did-”

The blip of utter confusion on Jeffrey’s face caught him short. He stopped and just looked.

“Yes,” Jeffrey said into his radio belatedly, and then holstered. Eren watched his thin, inexpressive eyebrows wrinkle and then smooth- watched the corner of his naturally impassive mouth turn down with distaste. “Jeffrey. Fucking Jeffrey. God. God, I hated that cover. What a stupid fucking name,” he muttered. “Fucking _Jeffrey_.”

As focused as he was, Eren didn’t even blink away the blood making its way into his eyelashes.

Jeffrey’s face was young, but the skin around his eyes and bracketing the corners of his mouth looked thin and weary.

He stared.

“How old are you?” His lips were so numb that, for a moment, he wasn’t sure he was the one who’d asked.

Jeffrey blinked. The tips of his eyelashes caught the light. Eren realized a couple of them were white.

“Older than you,” he answered cryptically. “You calmed down enough to cooperate?”

Eren didn’t answer, but he also didn’t struggle when Jeffrey’s hand lifted cautiously from his head.

He just kept staring.

“Good enough,” Jeffrey muttered, and gripped his upper arm tightly before shifting off of his back. “Up.”

It took him a couple of tries to get his feet under him, but when he did, he continued looking down in bewilderment. “You got shorter,” he accused.

Jeffrey grimaced at him. “You just grew,” he corrected, and then frowned.

Eren let him press him against the far wall, leaning his forehead against the window frame as he nudged his feet farther apart and began to pat him down, one hand still gripping his arm in warning.

He could see the dark parking lot through the gap between the wall and the curtain- could just barely see the gleam of his car antenna peering out of the gloom.

“What happened to Annie?” he asked, too numb and too exhausted to sound anything but conversational.

The hand that was patting along his sides slowed for a moment, but no answer came.

“Jeffrey, what happened to Annie?” he repeated.

A sigh. “My name isn’t Jeffrey.” He sounded sullen.

“So what is it?” As his eyes tried to adjust, dark shapes seemed to flit through the parking lot. The light above him made it hard to see past the glare.

Not-Jeffrey was silent.

“What’s your name?”

Another sigh. Eren tensed as that hand began to first pat brusquely along the front of his pants, and then between his legs and down his thighs.

Eren frowned. “I’m just going to keep ask-” he started, and then flinched back from the sudden burst of light in the parking lot. Not-Jeffrey froze, grip tightening. Eren blinked away afterimages.

Every light in his car was on- the cab lights, both headlights, taillights bright, washing the ground behind his bumper in a red glow.

He squinted. He could see something on the dashboard.

It was a doll head.

It had been turned to look at him.

“Mother _fucker_ ,” he snarled, craning forward even as he was pulled away from the window. “He fucking _followed_ me-”

“What?” Not-Jeffrey asked sharply, free hand tight on his shoulder as he peered over it. “Fuck. _Fuck._ It’s stalking you. Why is it stalking _you?_ I swear to god, kid, out of everyone I’ve met, you have the worst-”

When he cut himself off, Eren dragged his eyes from his car to look at him.

He remembered that look.

Those strange eyes in a calm face.

Not-Jeffrey’s face wasn’t even remotely calm this time- just tight and unreadable. He forced Eren back against the wall and fumbled his radio out again.

“Erwin,” he started crisply, “I think we might be dealing with a coordinate.”

Eren watched his lips move with a sense of weird dread. “What?” he tried to ask. Not-Jeffrey clicked his tongue against his teeth reproachfully.

_“I’m on my way.”_

Not-Jeffrey’s eyes darted from Eren’s face to the window. “No. It’s staked four’s car. It’s stalking the parking lot around the vehicle.” Abruptly, radio still clenched in one hand, he steered Eren away from one wall and forced him to kneel against the other, less than an arm’s length from Armin. Eren didn’t resist as he secured one of his bound wrists to the metal bedframe behind him.

Dimly, he realized the thin white bits of plastic he was using as being cable ties, and suddenly remembered their conversation about serial killers.

  _“You’ll have to hold out until morning. Will you be alright?”_ Not-Jeffrey’s radio was whispering.

“Yeah. We’re secured.” He glanced at his wrist, frowned, and then leaned over to peer into the kitchenette. “Less than two hours until dawn. I’ll be fine.”

_“Keep me updated. I’ll see you when the sun comes up, Levi.”_

“Levi?” Eren asked reflexively, startled.

Levi jerked, grimaced, and then groaned. “God _damn_ it, Erwin,” he cursed. “Look, you-”

“Eren,” he reminded. Levi glared at him.

“ _You_ ,” he repeated. “You’ve made this a hell of a lot harder than it ever had to be, you know that?”

Eren just watched him, marveling at the way the name seemed to settle into the corners of him so much more naturally. “Levi,” he said again, just moving it around in his mouth, tasting the sounds of it as he said them. “Huh.”

Levi shot him a weary glare and sat down on the floor opposite.

The quiet lasted until Eren tasted blood on his lips and remembered.

“What happened to Annie?”

Levi groaned, massaging his temples. He still hadn’t reholstered his radio. “Okay,” he muttered, “okay. Alright. If you’re a coordinate, we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other for a while. Your friends know how to shut up-” he nodded towards them, and Eren glanced over to see Armin shaking his head and Connie shrugging. It was hard to tell, back-to-back and bound by the wrists to the corner of the lower bed’s frame as they were, but behind him, Sasha seemed like she might be sleeping. “Shut up for a while. Let me talk. Everything’s gone to hell already, so it’s not going to get any worse if I tell you a little bit.”

Eren closed his mouth and nodded obligingly. His hair was starting to stick uncomfortably to the drying blood on his face. His wrists burned. His muscles ached. A headache was building behind the budding bruise on his forehead. He stifled a yawn.

Levi made a strange expression and then yawned as well. Connie snickered. Armin sighed and then yawned as well.

Looking at him, Eren felt another yawn come on.

“Stop that,” Levi snapped, visibly fighting another of his own. “Okay, let’s just… go through the list. Yes, my real name is Levi. No, I won’t tell you my last name. No,” he sighed, “I am not with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and no, I cannot tell you if I am employed by the government.” He paused, looked around, and then squinted. “Didn’t I tell you to become a cop? What happened to that? Did you give up after all?”

Eren saw Armin grimace out of the corner of his eye.

“I failed the psych eval,” he answered flatly.

“Ah,” Levi acknowledged, looking insultingly unsurprised. “Makes sense. Anyway, no, I cannot tell you my job description, only that it involves the investigation of things you’re not supposed to know about. When we met, I was undercover-” A big sigh, an unprompted yawn, and a frown. Eren struggled to smile and yawn at the same time. “-investigating the disappearances of your classmate and the other four youths that had vanished before her. I can’t tell you the specifics, but it had to do with the forest surrounding your school, which we might not have figured out so quickly if it wasn’t for you. So thanks.”

Eren frowned sleepily at him. “Was it the bunker?”

Levi shook his head. “The bunker was incidental. I can’t tell you more than that.”

Eren considered arguing and thought better of it. “What about now?” he asked instead. “What are you doing here now?” he clarified when his question earned him an inquisitive look. “Why are you doing this to us? What do you know about the creep with the doll parts?”

The look Levi gave him made him feel very young and unsure. “I’m here in the general sense because burnt doll parts keep showing up on the slide in an elementary school playground,” he droned, “and I’m here in your camper, specifically, because the four of you were not only getting into something you shouldn’t have, but actually bordering on interfering with our investigation of it.”

Behind the curtains, something started tapping lightly on the window above Levi’s head.

Connie let out a startled keen. Sasha murmured sleepy reassurances.

Armin’s breath quickened beside him.

Levi didn’t even blink.

Eren bared his teeth at him. “Great. So we’re, what, dealing with a serial killer or something? What the hell are we going to do if he gets in here?” He tugged against the bedframe demonstratively.

“It won’t.”

“The hatch I came in through is still unlocked,” he whispered fiercely, “he could still-”

“It won’t,” Levi repeated. “It’s not a serial killer. It’s not a he. It’s not a person. It’s a _thing_. Just a different thing than the usual.”

Eren’s words died on his lips as he realized Levi was serious. “Are you,” he whispered, starting to feel genuinely nervous for the first time, “are you nuts? That’s not-”

“Seven weeks ago, a five-year-old student of Trost Western elementary forgot her favourite doll on the slide when her parents came to take her home,” he told Eren briskly. “Six weeks ago, her seven-year-old elder sister, who’d been devoting the time she had between school ended and soccer practice to searching for the missing doll, fell asleep in the playground. At seven thirty-five that evening, she was rushed to the hospital by one of the school’s janitorial staff. She had second-degree burns all over her arms and the left side of her face.” His eyes were shuttered. “She told police that a man made of storm clouds offered her a doll head that looked like her sister’s and then struck her with lightning.”

Eren stared at him. He heard Armin inhale shakily through his teeth.

“Storm clouds?” Armin whispered.

Levi’s eyes didn’t move from Eren’s face. “Smoke,” he said. “It’s made of smoke. It’s attracted to unusually repetitive behaviour centred around a lost object. It lures its prey by offering them what it thinks they want.”

Eren frowned. “But I haven’t lost-”

“You were looking for the person who was leaving the doll parts,” Levi interrupted softly. “At first, it was trying to lure the girl back by leaving tokens- if you hadn’t engaged it, it would’ve left on its own. The only reason it’s still here is because it’s luring you, now.”

He shifted, settling back against the wall.

As conversation lapsed, the tapping continued.

“It’s going to be a long fucking two hours,” Levi muttered.


End file.
